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Sunday, March 5, 2017

One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with
the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end.

– George Orwell, “The Politics of the English Language”

With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth...– George Orwell, in a letter from 1944 (collected in George Orwell: A Life in Letters)

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible,
because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that
can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning
rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

My first impression after rereading George Orwell’s harrowing dystopian
novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is how much it reminded me of
totalitarianism in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. In this bleak,
repressive country named Oceania people's lives are constantly on
public display through the ubiquitous two-way telescreens. The
protagonist, Winston Smith, seeks privacy, itself suspicious, and
keeps a diary, a transgressive act deemed by the Party as intolerable because it suggests that a person can think for himself. Add in his
decision to develop a sexual relationship and soon agents of the Thought
Police are dispatched to hustle him away at night to the Ministry of Love.
As a political prisoner, Winston is at the whim not only of the guards, but also of the privileged criminals. He, along with other captives, is
disoriented, not knowing whether it is day or night, and is subjected to
excruciatingly painful interrogation inflicted with truncheons,
electricity, and the victim's greatest fear -- in Winston’s case, rats. No one is ever
really free again. Even prisoners who have been released will eventually be re-arrested
and “vaporized.” They will become “unpersons," every record of their
existence obliterated in the Records Department of the Ministry of
Truth, which sends all relevant documents down a “memory hole,” a job that
Winston once performed. Substitute the Lubyanka in then-Leningrad for Orwell’s
doublespeak euphemism and we have almost identical conditions to those that existed
in the Soviet Union. Even the Thought Police are based on the NKVD
(People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which actually used riled-up
rats in their interrogations.

A renewed interest in the Soviet Union, of course, cannot explain the surging popularity of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The election
of Donald Trump has been an impetus, yet I do not think that anyone can
reasonably suggest that Americans are about to descend into the
totalitarian conditions limned in the novel. But we are living in a time
that does summon up ominous features that derive from the novel and the former
Soviet Union. Consider President Trump’s almost daily “fake news”
accusations against The New York Times, his counselor Kellyanne
Conway’s coinage of “alternative facts,” echoing the linguistic inventions
of Orwell's Ministry of Truth and by implication Trump’s blatant contempt
for objective truth, and his -- along with his aides’ -- cascade of lies – from
false accusations that journalists invented a rift between him and the
intelligence community (when he compared the intelligence agencies to
Nazis) to debunked claims that millions of unauthorized immigrants robbed
him of a popular-vote majority.

Trump’s often jaw-dropping combination of dystopian jeremiads and grandiose
promises echoes Orwell’s Big Brother’s diktats that carry the imprimatur of
absolute truth by the citizens of Oceania. Irrational slogans take
precedence over rational thought and scientific evidence: among them, Black
is White, 2+2=5, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is
Strength. The Party insists on defining its own reality and propaganda
permeates the lives of people too distracted by “rubbishy” tabloids
(“containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology”) and
sex-filled movies to care much about politics or history. In news articles and
books rewritten by the Ministry of Truth the past is described
as a benighted time that has given way to the Party’s efforts to make
Oceania great again despite the empirical evidence to the contrary: grim
living conditions, shortages of decent food and clothing. Not surprisingly,
the Party has largely vaporized everyone who lived through the earlier time
or the Revolution itself so that no contrary voices can contradict the
official story – again echoes of Stalinism.

Trump’s deployment of the phrase “enemy of the American people” is designed
to isolate his supporters from any unpalatable reality that could damage
his presidency by stigmatizing anyone, including the media, who is critical of him.
It is an echo of “enemy of the people,” a branding that could be a death
sentence under Stalin. In Nazi Germany, Propaganda Minister,Joseph
Goebbels wrote in 1941 that every Jew was “a sworn enemy of the German
people.” And who are the “people’? According to columnist Roger Cohen,
they are “an aroused mob imbued with some mythical essence of nationhood or
goodness by a charismatic leader.” In the Soviet Union, they surrounded the
courts of the trials of the enemy of the people “chanting at intervals
‘Death to the traitors!’” But here I quote not from a historical monograph
exploring the Great Terror (1936-38) but from Nineteen Eighty-Four. In every instance, the “people” are
reframed according to their class, race or ethnic group and pitted against the other. In Trump’s world, the “American people”
are diehard ultranationalists, white supremacists and large pockets of the
white working class while the enemy consists of Muslims, refugees and
undocumented immigrants. Furthermore, any critical media reportage or
independent judge who challenges him ignites a flurry of puerile insults.

One of the most unsettling features of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Two Minutes Hate, which turns
into an annual week-long festival. The denizens of Oceania are whipped into
a frenzy of hatred and loathing against Oceania’s geo-political enemies:
Eurasia and East Asia. These two other great powers live under similar
totalitarian systems as that of Oceania. A further target is the visceral
hate directed against the “primal traitor,” Emmanuel Goldstein, (read Leon
Trotsky) whenever his “lean Jewish face” flashes up on the telescreen.
Through his protagonist, Orwell examines the psychological fallout on the
citizens:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Orwell astutely recognizes that once this violence is activated, it can
readily be redirected at other targets. The permission to hate coarsens
society by inhibiting civility and reducing the threshold for verbal
violence, attributes that resonate in the aftermath of Trump’s victory.
Under the pretext of buffing away “political correctness,” a surge in crude, offensive language, that targeted among others, the former First
Lady, Muslims, and Hispanics, was followed by a spike in anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic hate crimes. The President’s tardy and lackadaisical response in condemning this
behaviour and criminal actions has only emboldened the haters to feel that
their slurs and actions have been licensed.

The degree and intensity of visceral rage described by Orwell may have
exceeded the verbiage of racist language and xenophobic outbursts that permeated Trump’s rallies, as well as the stoking of fear and division at the Republican Convention.
But at the convention, he and his acolytes demonstrated a capacity for
igniting the fires of diehard anti-Clinton feeling. Anyone who watched will
recall the strident, vitriolic speech by Michael Flynn, a retired
lieutenant general, former intelligence officer and now former National Security Advisor after the shortest tenure in that position in
American history. “Our very existence is threatened,” Flynn declared. What was needed was a president with “guts,” not a “weak spineless” one "who believes she is above
the law.” When his audience responded with chants of “Lock her up!," Flynn
egged them on, “That’s right – lock her up” and a few
moments later, “If I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth – a
tenth -- of what she did, I would be in jail today.” The statement is rich in
irony given the reason for his recent firing.

Perhaps Orwell’s creation of Newspeak – the official language of Oceania
and created to supersede Oldspeak or Standard English – is his most
important legacy as it transcends totalitarian states and has gained
increasing relevance in backsliding democracies. Anyone who takes a cursory
glance at social media, specifically the widespread use of Twitter and
Facebook, and news reports of threats to muzzle scientists if their
research holds the possibility of challenging government policies, will
appreciate Orwell’s prescience. Newspeak is characterized by a simple and continually
diminishing vocabulary with the goal of narrowing the range of
thought so that citizens will not possess the linguistic or scientific
tools to formulate rational critiques and draw conclusions from
experimentation since, according the Newspeak Appendix in the novel, “there
was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind or
a method of thought.” Unsurprisingly, there is no word for science.
Northrup Frye in The Educated Imagination argues that the
purpose of Newspeak is to “deliberately debase our language by turning our
speech into automatic gabble.” He could have been talking about Trump with
his rudimentary vocabulary and his incoherent rambles or any other current
demagogues who flagrantly lie.

Adam Gopnik has raised the spectre of America turning into a fascist state
comparable to what Orwell depicted: “Because the single most striking thing
about [Trump’s] matchlessly strange first week is how primitive,
atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is
turning out to be. We have to go back to 1984 because, in effect, we have
to go back to 1948 to get the flavor.” Gopnik is a compelling journalist, but on this issue I am more persuaded by
Republican critic David Frum, whose illuminating essay argues that the exemplars of strongmen
illiberalism prominent in South Africa, Venezuela and Hungary could provide
the model for Trump’s America. Characterized less by ideology and more by
kleptocracy, these regimes are more in tune with the twenty-first century
than with the totalitarianism of surveillance and repression that scarred
mid-twentieth century Europe. Hungary still retains the trappings of a
democracy with elections and an uncensored Internet; opponents of the
regime are not killed or imprisoned, though they can be harassed with tax
audits or be fired if they have government contracts. The principal method
of silencing critics is through intimidation. The courts are losing their
independence and independent media outlooks are losing advertising revenue
owing to government pressure, while supporters are financially rewarded.

America, Frum argues, is still a vibrant democracy but its vulnerability
resides in the character and qualities of the individual who is president.
Trump has attacked the freedom of the press enshrined in the First
Amendment and the independence of the judiciary, but his primary goal is to
enrich himself, protect himself and his family with legal immunity and seek
payback against his critics. True, his actions will provoke unrest, but
Trump is counting on that to further polarize the country. Frum writes,“Polarization,
not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.” Trump will look to his
allies such as Fox News to support him, as they have done, by lashing out
at “fake news” in the “liberal” media, and to his Twitter supporters who
fully embrace him. There is no need for storm troopers in the streets when
his army of fans can troll online to spread the message and intimidate his
critics. Frum quotes with admiration the Russian-born journalist, Masha
Gessen, who compares the Russophile Trump with his doppelgänger, Vladimir
Putin: “Lying is the message. It’s not just that they lie, it’s
that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to
assert power over truth.”

Gessen’s aperçu pivots us back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, not the world of O'Brien’s violent prognostication that
the future will consist of a boot kicking a human face forever but one less
crudely overt: the contest for power over who will determine what
constitutes reality. We already live in a bubble where we doubt any photograph or narrative that challenges our views. Just as fabricated photos and bios are created or disappear down the memory hole in the novel, paper is giving way to digital data, and the process of altering reality becomes much simpler for any power base that has ownership over the data and the image. Currently, America’s Big Brother, with his
direct Twitter relationship with his followers, is in an all-out struggle
to control the message. Almost daily we are bombarded with evidence of Orwell's prescience. Trump’s slogan should be “Ignorance is Strength.”